Seeds (and other things)

Right, I have finally done my seed order. Having no greenhouse and limited indoor space, I needn’t have been in such a hurry, but all my forum friends with polytunnels are ordering seeds, so I felt left out. =)

I didn’t need that much, having managed to swap things on various forums and received some as my SSish Secret Santa present (I STILL don’t know who it was from….) but I wanted some beans and peas (got some dwarf peas which should be happy in a box) and then I bought some tomatilloes on a whim. I don’t even know what they are, apparently a cross between my two very favourite things – lemons and tomatoes. Sounds mighty peculiar. I was intrigued.

Oh, and I bought ‘The Fat of the Land’ because it seemed really hard to get hold of and the Real Seed Co had it for £9. Yay!

And a chilli plant. On ebay. On a whim. I must go and repot it before it gets dark.

I’ve also been discussing my potential new job and beavering away explaining how commuting is going to a) take 3+ hours of my day and b) cost nearly £4000 a year, and these are not good things, and have been slowing increasing the working at home quotient. Phew.

I love working from home. I probably spend about as much time working as I would in an office, but if I was in an office, I’d be subject to the peculiar, stringent double-standard custom of, ‘if you have nothing to do right now, sit around at your computer and look busy, your time is MINE and I want you here till 5 dammit; but, yeah, tomorrow, can you stay till 6???’ As it is, when there’s no work (or if I’m super-efficient and don’t spend all day blogging) I can go for a walk, or bake, or read or something. Or I can choose to go out in the garden when it’s still light and make up for it by working in the evening. I can go to the farmer’s market. I can make meals that don’t require any more chopping or preparation than what we’d eat if we did it at 6 pm, but because they can sit in the slow cooker all afternoon are about half the price.

I know that there is a point at which it is more economical to work less for cash and more for your own needs, and we do aspire to that. But it requires more land, or at the very least more soil, and I have a student loan to pay off. Realistically, we aren’t there yet. And I thought I was going to have to cut back on a lot of what I can do on that front (and a lot of what makes it easy – not possible, it’s possible to be green while working 9-5, but it’s not easy – to be ‘greener’) but it doesn’t look like I will after all. And into the bargain I get a bit more human interaction every now and then, a job that requires more thinking and less monkey-work (so less RSI!! hurrah!! – okay, it’s not total monkey-work, monkeys can’t punctuate, but it can get repetitive) and the odd trip to London to combine with meeting friends and going to the theatre.

We got a good veg box this week. Parnsips AND purple sprouting broccoli (of which I am, as you may have guessed, a big fan), and a bag of salady things. Mmm. Leafy. Parents coming this weekend, so they can help us eat stuff up. We have a surfeit of carrots. Our massive bag of farm shop potatoes that we bought in October is also going a bit soft and sprouting like no-one’s business. The bf is meant to be picking some tires up when he gets something done on his car so we can grow our own potatoes this year.

Oh, and, bizarrely, this week SSish appears to have turned into a gun-toting, baked-bean-hoarding, hardcore survivalist forum! Rather amusing really! I tried to point out that investing in your local community is a quite effective form of self-preservation (albeit a more challenging and less adrenaline-fuelled one than stocking up on ammo) but everyone thought that made me a loony idealist who thinks we should all just sit around and sing ‘Kum ba yah’ and nothing nasty will ever happen. Oops….

Peak Oil, Climate Change and Campaigning Links

Rob Hopkins, Transition Handbook

“Environmentalists have often been guilty of presenting people with a mental image of the world’s least desirable holiday destination – some seedy bed and breakfast near Torquay, with nylon sheets, cold tea and soggy toast – and expecting them to get excited about the prospect of NOT going there. The logic and the psychology are all wrong.”

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

"Food is that rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure."

Carlo Petrini

"A gastronome who is not also an environmentalist is an idiot. An environmentalist who is not also a gastronome is, well, sad."

Sharon Astyk

"I am, of course, firmly opposed to consumerism and corporatism in all its forms, and I believe that we are deeply confused about material needs and wants. Now let me explain how books and yarn are totally different than the material things that other people want ;-)…."

Raj Patel, at Slow Food Nation

"Biofuels, which is the preposterous policy that we should grow food not to eat it but to set it on fire."